Suffering love

This week's On Being interview was with john a. powell, the director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California at Berkeley who "is a legal scholar and thinker who counsels all kinds of people and projects on the front lines of our current racial anguish and longings."

Here is how he ended the interview: . . . if you suffer, it does not imply love. But if you love, it does imply suffering. So part of the thing that I think what being human means to love and to suffer, to suffer with, though, compassion, not to suffer against. So to have a space big enough to suffer with. And if we can hold that space big enough, we also have joy and fun even as we suffer. And suffering will no longer divide us. And to me, that's sort of the human journey.

And here is the eulogy that President Obama delivered in Charleston this week. Parts of it moved me to tears.



I hope you have the time to listen to or to read the transcript of the interview and to listen to the eulogy.